@ Ike how you will respond to my scholastic query that some us were discussing about: '' We found you guilty of '' debasing the minds of faithful and of transgression of not believing in our gods" and consequently will be sentenced to perpetual damnation in hell.
I am not an infidel! The overthrow of man from the central role of the keeper of the universe was not an easy acceptance by self styled saviours of mankind i.e. 'We and I !'
I am just a useless wanderer, before you a throw a stone at me; please listen to my side of the story too. It sadly remains a time honoured tradition of man, that reason and free thinking has always been considered 'paganism' for a holy man.
From what we know now of the universe, the limited scale of the genesis of human understanding is so humbling. We know that our greatest philosophers and prophets were so imperfect; infallibility of thought is the 'Achilles' heel' of man. Luckily, we can criticize our philosophers without much impunity but forget about prophets. Their sanctified position remains too virtuous to be subject of debate.
As time passes by in the twilight of one's career, the most painful predicament is when one becomes aware of 'so much to learn with so little time available.'
It is always the inadequacies and gaps in my comprehension of universal truth, the very idea of knowing so little and the very dynamic nature of truth, infuriates me sometimes and razes the peace of my mind. Follies of intellect are difficult to argue with. It is a fact that knowledge is bestowed to mankind in dots and drips.
I have always maintained that history cannot be judged from our own vantage point. It would be mockery of a fair deal to pass judgements based on realities of today. No knowledge is flawless, neither is any philosopher or a prophet.
"Contemporary transformation" and the dominant and invasive modifications taking place throughout all aspects of human existence beg the questions: Where are we potentially heading and, perhaps more importantly, where should we be heading?
As I have put it mildly on my introduction on Newsvine under my picture 'Searching the purpose of our existence and where do we end up?'
We discover truth with the passing of eons. The definition of truth keeps changing; the dynamics of the change is what our minds need to train for. As if 'facts' are not fixed, they keep changing over time.
Let's take an example: joblessness causes frustration and extreme anger. Aristotle said that all paid jobs cause degradation of mind. Aristotle could not imagine a society with 1 billion job seekers, this scale of human degradation has inevitably caused momentous strides in research and development.
He also postulated that ''the universe is perfect; the Earth is the center of this perfect universe, and that everything in the universe revolves around the Earth.''
In Athens, his teacher Plato also believed with the Pythagoreans that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon moved around the Earth attached to the surface of crystalline spheres which slid over one another while circumscribed about the five regular solids. Plato founded a school of learning in a place that once belonged to the Greek hero Academos (from whom "academy" is derived).
Over the academy's door was written: "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here." It flourished for over 900 years, from 387 B.C. to 529 A.D. when it was closed by the Christian emperor Justinian who claimed it was pagan.
Our inability to subject the popular wisdom of "creation" to the test of reason shall be considered by many of us as blasphemous. Noah existed 6000 years or 13.7 billions years ago; that is a miscalculation that we can live with serenely, but the same obstinacy and inflexibility where freedom of thought is moderated by the Holy Scriptures leads to maniacal display of mediaevalism by extremists of the world.
Even if and whenever science became a "cult," persecution followed. The Pythagoreans who followed the teachings of Pythagoras believed that science was meant only for the chosen few and that commoners should have nothing to do with it. Philosophers can be cruel too; sometimes when reason failed, persecution took over the better part of judgement. Inquisitions and burning at stake was not just a sacred preoccupation, even Pythagoras to his eternal shame sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning.
One cannot even envisage the horrors in 387 B.C. if Copernicus or Galileo entered the academy and would declare the legitimacy of the heliocentric cosmology. Rubbishing earth as the centre of universe would have been considered as heretical and blasphemous in the sacrosanct environ of the academy, as it was by the clergy of Rome, nearly 2000 years later.
Italian philosopher Galileo Galilee was one of the supreme figures of contemporary science. His rank as a "saint" of the modern world hinges on his discrimination by the Catholic Church for boldly championing the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun, in contradiction to scripture, church tradition and the ancient authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
The truth remained concealed by the fate from the curious minds of philosophers in the multilayered shrouds of ambiguity. It was as if waiting for the genius of Bruno. Giordano Bruno is known as 'The Forgotten Philosopher' who predicted ' Infinite Galaxies, Infinite Life.'
By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome's Campo dei Fiori for his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe the Inquisition, condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee. Giordano Bruno is one of the enormous figures of renaissance Europe. He is an intellectual peer of the greatest thinkers, a thinker whose dream of the world foreshadowed ours.
We have deciphered knowledge to extended boundaries of fiction. Science fiction is actually our evolutionary fiction. Nothing has been left for future which is improbable, if we can think of 'cellular transportation of bodies' through space by 'beaming up or beaming down' not much is left to achieve for advanced sciences. What we can think is probably what we can achieve.
A cave man could not envision a flying machine he could not build one, Leonardo de Vinci thought of one we build it within four centuries of that vision.
We gaze into the heart of the far away galaxies as Columbus would stand on the shores of Atlantic and try to carve a path through the ocean onto India. The story of human achievements still remains untold, millions of years from now these Hubble's of ours will be precursors of the ships that will relate to spell bound children of humans in the heart of the far away galaxies the inadequacies of their ancestors minds.
I only seek freedom of my mind from the steel anchors of our seriously flawed corporeal mind. I want my mind to flow free and just go away quietly. Go ahead, annihilation is journey to become star dust and shortest way to the core of the stars.
Iqbal Latif